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Irakli Alsania, leader of the Alliance for Georgia and candidate for mayor of Tbilisi says that, although he has little money with which to mount an election campaign, he is picking up volunteers who are getting his message out door-to-door in Tbilisi.

Currently the "air war" - the electoral battle in the mass media, particularly the broadcasters - is dominated by incumbent mayor Gigi Ugulava while the opposition seem only to gain coverage for the interminable dispute over should be the single opposition candidate for the mayor's office.

But if the opposition can make inroads in the "ground war" - the hard slog of door-to-door talking and voter mobilisation they could begin to significantly dent Ugulava's undoubted current advantage.

Alasania is having to walk a fine line: pressing home his status as what most agree is the opposition's front-runner to squeeze other opposition candidates' votes while avoiding getting personally drawn into a slanging match with anyone other than the mayor - who has managed to stay above the fray precisely because of the opposition's internal divisions.

Now, says Alasania, in an interview with the Georgian Times, that has to change:

My political force, the Alliance, and myself as a candidate are going to be fully involved in campaigning, in making people understand that we are offering a change, a change for better. We are going to do a better job for them when we are the local government, in the Mayor’s office. For me these few months before the elections will be about campaigning and bringing change to the population.

...at this point we are financing the campaign with our own resources and we do not have much of an operation in the regions now for that reason. But I want to declare that we have a lot more volunteers working for us now. Door to door and town hall meetings will be important for our campaign, and these do not require much money. It requires just will and effort from the political side to be engaged in a direct dialogue with the population of Tbilisi.
 

Asked about fromer parliament speaker Nino Burjanadze's trip to Moscow, the former Georgian ambassador to the UN doubted it would have any lasting impact on Russian-Georgian relations:

I think the Georgian-Russian relationship has a future, but it will be a long time before we start political talks on the most sensitive issue for Georgia, which is the fulfillment by the Russian Federation of the agreement of August 12 2008 which requires them to leave Georgian territory. I do believe that political talks can lead naturally to the fulfillment of this agreement, but first and foremost I think we have at this point to concentrate all our efforts on containing Russia, not soliciting more aggressive behaviour from it, and start building our relationship with the Abkhazian and Ossetian population step by step. At this point I do not see any breakthrough possible through talks between the opposition and the Government of the Russian Federation. When we are in government after wining the elections, then of course we will start cementing our foreign policy priorities towards Russia as well.